Language shifts in the language biographies of immigrants from Upper Silesia residing in Germany

1 Introduction

This article presents language biographies of immigrants from Upper Silesia who resides in Germany. Its main objective is to illustrate how language ideologies and language management affect language change. Language ideologies are defined as “any sets of beliefs about language articulated by users as a rationalization or justification of perceived language structure and use” (Silverstein 1979: 193). Language management is broadly understood as a “behavior-toward-language” (Fishman 1971; Nekvapil and Sherman 2015: 1; Nekula in press). It encompasses decisions and behavior pertaining to language, which result in changes in its structure and use. Changes can be initiated by various actors, both those associated with the authorities, and ordinary language users. Developing this theory, Nekvapil and Sherman stressed the relationship between top-down language management organized by authorities, and bottom-up language management at the level of the family, or individual decisions and actions. They observe that the top-down and bottom-up metaphors make it possible to describe more complicated situations than macro- (state policies) and micro-policies (local policies and activities of families and individuals), because individual actions are often associated with those organized by authorities (Nekvapil and Sherman 2015: 2).

This article presents the results of studies into German-Polish bilingualism, jointly conducted within the project entitled Language across generations: Contact induced change in morphosyntax in German-Polish bilingual speech by the Institute of Slavic Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences, and the University of Regensburg. In 2018–2019, numerous field studies were conducted in Upper Silesia which was incorporated into Poland in 1945, and in Germany, among immigrants from the same area. The study covers bilinguals from two generations:

1. An older generation who live in Poland, in the territories that belonged to Germany until 1945. These informants were born before 1945 and the majorities were born in the 1930s.

2. A younger, middle-aged generation of people born in Poland in the 1950s and 1960s in the same territories, who currently live in Germany. They emigrated in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s.

The study examines bilingual people from these two generations. They have the same linguistic and cultural origins but now live in linguistically different contexts. Their language biographies are closely related to historic events, such as World War II and the profound socio-political transformation in post-war Poland.

By October 2019, the language biographies of 124 bilinguals had been examined, including 20 research participants living in Upper Silesia and 28 research participants born in Upper Silesia and living in Germany at present. Language biographies of the speakers from the latter group are analyzed in this article. They were born in the years 1947–1974 in the prudnicki, kędzierzyńsko-kozielski, raciborski, krapkowicki, zabrzański, opolski, tyski, nyski, świętochłowicki, chorzowski, piekarski, siemianowicki and bielski districts. For around 30 years, they have been living in Germany, in towns and villages in North Rhine-Westphalia, Rhineland-Palatinate, Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria, Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein. They are all Catholics. The interviewees were selected based on the manner and period of their language acquisition, their origins in Upper Silesia, and having lived in Germany for approximately 30 years. The interviews were carried out in a maximally natural setting, most often in respondents’ homes. The conversation started spontaneously in one of the languages, but after an hour the researcher switched the language so that 1 h of the interview was in German and 1 h in Polish. In response, the interlocutor also switched languages. The respondents did not seem to perceive this situation as artificial as they did not comment on this switch to the other language. Thus, all the respondents were interviewed in two languages, Polish and German. Interestingly, some respondents engaging in code-switching in their interviews in Polish, using Silesian words, and sometimes Silesian grammatical structures and phonetic features. These interviews were semi-orthographically transcribed accounting for the Silesian influences on their statements in Polish. The interviews will be incorporated into a large multi-media corpus of Polish-German bilingualism collected as part of the Language across generations: Contact induced change in morpho-syntax in German-Polish bilingual speech project. The corpus will include audiotexts and their transcriptions from the entire area incorporated into Poland in 1945, as well as from different places in Germany. It will include long statements by Polish and German bilinguals. The corpus will be multimodal, combining audio recordings with transcriptions, allowing corpus users to encounter the original speech of bilingual speakers.

2 Theoretical foundations of language biography studies

A language biography is the story of the acquisition and use of languages throughout a person’s life, taking into account the successive phases of life (childhood, youth, adulthood, old age) and events that have influenced the change in that person’s language. Language biographies are reconstructed on the basis of narrative interviews in which multilingual persons talk about their experiences related to different languages (Franceschini and Miecznikowski 2004: XII). The essence of studies on language biographies is to see language phenomena from the perspective of the speakers, especially their subjective experiences, emotions, as well as wishes, desires, fears and perceptions related to language (Busch 2013: 17, 2016: 2). A multilingual speaker is the object of study and its central category. The linguistic reality is presented from their individual perspective in the first person (Busch 2013: 8–9, 2016: 5).

The method of biographical interview, which is the origin of language biography studies, is part of the paradigm whereby the subjective vision of the world of the investigated persons is examined, i.e., the anthropological paradigm of emic rather than etic. The emic attitude applied in anthropological studies originates from the concept of the humanistic factor developed by Florian Znaniecki, the founder of humanistic sociology and co-author of a study entitled The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (), which was fundamental for the sociology of labor. The procedure of the open interview is explained in the book L’entretien compréhensif (2016) by Jean-Claude Kaufmann, who refers to Anselm Strauss’s grounded theory, ethnomethodology, Max Weber’s sociology of understanding and Pierre Bourdieu’s works. Kaufmann argues with the classic interpretation of sociological methods which devalues qualitative methods, focusing on quantitative methods and surveys instead. The study of language biographies under the above-mentioned project refer to Kaufmann’s concept.

While the biographical turn dates back to the early 1980s, linguists carried out studies within this research paradigm even earlier. The first studies of biographical material by linguists examined the development of bilingualism in their own children in the first half of the twentieth century (Leopold 1939–1949; Ronjat 1913). In 1934–1935, Halina Turska conducted sociolinguistic field research in Poland, in the Vilnius area (today, this territory is in Lithuania). Based on biographical interviews with the representatives of three generations of inhabitants of many villages, she found that the Polish-language areas had emerged as a result of a language change which took place in the young generation of Lithuanian peasants at the beginning of the second half of the nineteenth century (Turska 1995: 34). Women played a leading role in the process of language change (Turska 1995: 35). Halina Turska can therefore be considered a forerunner of the studies on language biographies and historical sociolinguistics. Linguists have also used their own experience of bilingualism as a topic of academic reflection, as shown by the articles by Anna Wierzbicka (1990, 1997). This linguist, an emigrant from Poland living in Australia, analyzes her own bilingualism, which she sees as living in two worlds. The experience of one’s own bilingualism has also become a literary theme in the famous book Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language (Hoffman 1998) by an American writer from Kraków, Eva Hoffman. The author describes the development of her own bilingualism related to emigration. Studies are developing with particular intensity in German-speaking countries, where they are based on sociological works, primarily those of Fritz Schütze (1983 among others), Martin Kohli (1981 among others) and Gabriele Rosenthal (1995; 2006). The results of studies on language biographies in various parts of the world are presented in the monograph by Johanna Miecznikowski and Rita Franceschini (2004).

Language biographies are the life stories of multilingual speakers. For example, Michał Głuszkowski presents the language biographies of bilingual Russian Old Believers living in Poland in the Suwałki-Sejny region (Głuszkowski 2011). He describes language biography as the whole of the development stages relevant to the particular idiolect of a person. He analyzes the psycho-sociolinguistic development of the individual, including subsequent stages of their life (Głuszkowski 2011: 127). The same current is represented by Katharina Meng’s works on the Russian Germans (Meng 2004). Language biographies are constructed on the basis of data contained in interviews, participant observations and field study notes. According to Meng, a language biography is a systemic presentation of a person’s linguistic development divided into the subsequent stages of their life and taking into account the social context. Within this research approach, particular attention is given to the processes related to the acquisition, use, change and loss of languages in a politico-social context. Each of these processes can be observed, on the one hand, in the individual phases of one’s life and, on the other, in the social space, which can be divided using the domain method (e.g., family, neighborhood, religion, work, etc.) (Fishman 1964). It is usually assumed that family is the central domain, as it is the first language environment of every person.

3 The history of Upper Silesia

The language biographies of immigrants from Upper Silesia are greatly influenced by historical and political events. Upper Silesia is a heterogeneous multicultural and multilingual region that is today situated in both Poland and the Czech Republic. It is the part of Silesia located on the Upper Oder, and in Poland it encompasses the areas around cities such as Opole, Racibórz, Koźle, Głubczyce, Gliwice, Bytom and Katowice. Over the ages, its dynastic and political borders, alongside statehood, have changed many times. In the nineteenth century, most of it belonged to Prussia, which is why it was incorporated into a united Germany in 1871. After World War I, Upper Silesia was in the territories of three countries: the German Reich, the Republic of Poland and Czechoslovakia (Linek 2015: 379). The beginnings of the distinction between Lower and Upper Silesia date back to the fifteenth century. In the eighteenth century, Upper Silesia, where a Silesian version of the Polish language was spoken, began to stand for backwardness in German discourse, as a result of religious (Upper Silesians are mostly Catholics) and linguistic differences (Linek 2015: 380–381). During the long period of Silesia being incorporated into the German state, German use increased significantly, also entering those language domains where Silesian was previously dominant. What was important in this respect was that Polish was removed from schools, and compulsory teaching in German was introduced in 1872, which resulted in a gradual increase in bilingualism even among the rural population, who previously would often speak only Silesian (Choroś 2015: 70; Matuschek 1997: 110).

As a result, Upper Silesians from regions in the east were usually bilingual and spoke both German and Silesian. For the studies carried out as part of the project, the period after World War II is significant, when Silesia (previously part of Germany) was incorporated into Poland. From the turn of 1944/45, the remaining German population and German language was the target of a repressive policy of the Polish state and supported by the Polish community. In the post-war years, Poles wanted to retaliate and obtain compensation for the harm they had suffered during World War II. It was widely believed that Germans should be interned and displaced, and that German should be eradicated (Kacprzak 2010: 215). Shortly after the war, about three million Germans were displaced from Poland and only qualified specialists were kept who were needed in industry. People who could prove the Polish origin of their families were also allowed to stay; however, all of them underwent cultural and linguistic polonization (Madajczyk 1998: 66–67). The campaign to erase everything that was German was carried out by regional authorities in all areas incorporated into Poland, but it was the most intensive in the Śląskie Region (Kacprzak 2010: 230), which before 1950 also comprised the majority of today’s Opolskie Region – the pre-war Opole district. In order to determine who was Polish and who was German, the nationality of the indigenous population from the territories incorporated into Poland was investigated. Speaking Polish was one of the decisive criteria for Polishness, sometimes limited to the knowledge of the text of a prayer (Kneip 2000: 164; Madajczyk and Berlińska 2008: 549). Madajczyk and Berlińska observe that “borderland communities were treated instrumentally – the incorporation of Silesians and Masurians into the Polish nation served as an additional argument to legitimize the shift of the western border” (Madajczyk and Berlińska 2008: 240). Following the trend to establish nation-states, the authorities emphasized the de-germanization of the incorporated areas, that is the removal of all traces of German, consisting of the massive polonization of names and surnames, the ban on German names, the elimination of German from public and private life, the removal of traces of German culture in the form of German names, inscriptions, tombstones, and the destruction of German books. All forms of association with the German culture and people were persecuted by various sanctions – fines, detention, imprisonment in camps, dismissal from work or resettlement to Germany (Linek 1997: 74). According to Madajczyk and Berlińska, “the removal of German traces had the intended effect at the turn of 1948/1949. Although not entirely removed, they were no longer a visible part of the cultural landscape” (Madajczyk and Berlińska 2008: 564). After massive displacements to Germany immediately after the war, the population structure continued to change in Silesia. New inhabitants settled down in Silesia, mainly from the former Polish eastern regions incorporated into the Soviet Union, as well as settlers from other parts of Poland destroyed during the war. Apart from the tens of thousands of Germans needed in industry, Lower Silesia became inhabited by an entirely immigrant population, while the Silesian population, which identified as Polish during the verification operation, remained in Upper Silesia (Karch 2018: 274, 290). The newcomers lived here alongside the former residents (Karch 2018: 287; Madajczyk 1998: 67; Madajczyk and Berlińska 2008: 524). The new inhabitants were generally hostile towards the Upper Silesians, clearly considering them to be Germans. The social situation of the indigenous inhabitants of Upper Silesia was therefore very difficult. This, along with various other reasons (family reunion, financial situation, nationality), increased their desire to leave Poland. In 1949–1954 alone, almost 100,000 people left Poland for Germany under the family reunion campaign (Madajczyk 1998: 87). The number of immigrants remained high in the years that followed: “By February 1959, 253,130 people had left, including all the intelligentsia” (Madajczyk 1998: 95). In the 1970s, pursuant to the Gierek-Schmidt agreement, another 120,000–125,000 persons were permitted to leave for Germany in exchange for a business loan granted to Poland. Over 47,000 people left for Germany from the Opolszczyzna alone. The name Opolszczyzna refers to the Opole Region (Pl.: województwo opolskie). It spread after World War II and the influx of persons displaced from the Eastern Borderlands (Linek 2015: 382). The wave of departures grew stronger again starting in mid-1981 (Madajczyk 1998: 104–108). This is the period (the 1980s and early 1990s) when most of the respondents interviewed in this article left Poland. A total of over 1.5 million people used the opportunity to leave for Germany between 1950 and 2005 (Lasatowicz and Weger 2008: 149).

The immigrants from Upper Silesia form part of a very large group named Aussiedler in German law, in accordance with the German Federal Law on Expellees (Bundesvertriebenengesetz, BVFG) (Dietz 2011). This term is explained by Barbara Dietz:

The term Aussiedler was coined in the early 1950s as the influx of German minorities from east-central and southeastern Europe and the Soviet Union continued after the flight and expulsion during the immediate postwar years had come to an end. The Constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany (Article 116, paragraph 1) guarantees the admission of these persons as German citizens: ‘Unless otherwise provided by a law, a German within the meaning of this Constitution is a person who possesses German citizenship or who has been admitted to the territory of the German Reich within the boundaries to the territory of December 31, 1937 as a refugee or expellee of German ethnic origin or as the spouse or descendant of such person.’ Decisive for admission as Aussiedler are the ‘German ethnicity’ of the immigrants and the ‘expulsion pressure’ in their county of origin” (Dietz 2011: 245).

Immigrants from Upper Silesia being included in the group of Aussiedler is fundamental for the topic of the language shift discussed here. The German policy towards Aussiedler aimed at their complete integration into German society:

Since the beginning of the immigration of Aussiedler, it was a political goal in Germany to ease and promote the integration of this group, something that had already been laid down programmatically in the immediate postwar period for refugees and expellees. Along with the granting of German citizenship to Aussiedler, this attitude led to the privileged admission of this group of immigrants (Dietz 2011: 248). The actions promoting the integration of this group include considerable social support and financing language courses. Even though the financial means earmarked for the integration of Aussiedler dwindled in the 1990s, this group was socially and financially privileged compared to other immigrants (Dietz 2011: 248).

In our project, we do not use the category of ethnicity essential to the definition of the Aussiedler, and neither do we use the categories of nationality. The Silesian identity is a complex structure which is examined via the interviews (Księżyk in press). For the same reason, we also do not use the term Aussiedler, which was created for political purposes, but prefer the more general term immigrants.

4 Language change in Upper Silesia after 1945

Even before the 1945 border shift, many inhabitants of Upper Silesia knew Silesian, but it was not widely spoken, especially in the cities. The extent to which it was spoken depended also on individual factors, such as origin, occupation or social group (Kneip 2000: 160). The statements in the interviews we collected show that Silesian can be considered a separate language, e.g.,:

Silesian is sometimes called Wasserpolnisch – ‘diluted Polish’ in German. Yet, some respondents do not make a distinction between Silesian and Polish in their accounts, which creates interpretational problems.

Current studies on Silesian indicate an increasingly clear trend of Silesian becoming emancipated and officialized. Nevertheless, the attempts to include Silesian in the Law on national and ethnic minorities and regional languages (Ustawa o mniejszościach narodowych i etnicznych oraz o języku regionalnym) have so far been futile (Michna 2019: 59). While scholars are divided on the matter of the officialization of Silesian, the idea of an independent Silesian ethnolect has been winning supporters among linguists and sociologists. Speakers of Silesian are also becoming increasingly convinced of the fact that Silesian is an entity independent from Polish (Jaroszewicz 2019a: 141–142). In the latest census, over 500,000 people living in Poland indicated Silesian as a language used at home (Gudaszewski 2015: 69). Silesian was also the main mother tongue indicated by the interviewees (140,000), second only to Polish (Gudaszewski 2015: 82; Kamusella 2016: 90). The proponents of the officialization of Silesian emphasize objective conditions in favor of elevating Silesian to the level of a language, such as the fact that the Silesian ethnolect has been listed as a separate entity on the official list of languages acknowledged by the International Organization for Standardization; they also indicate that Silesian operates in a majority of functional language areas, which definitely goes beyond the framework of dialectal creativity, and to the standardization and codification attempts taken with respect to Silesian in the Cieszyn principles of Silesian orthography (Jaroszewicz 2019b: 27, 32; Michna 2019: 59; Wyderka 2018: 9). Given the above, the fact that Silesian has not been recognized as an official language is interpreted in political terms (Kamusella 2016: 109). However, Hentschel takes a neutral position on this matter and recommends that Silesian be treated as a (regio-)lect, thereby supporting the use of a politically neutral term, and argues that Silesian is transforming into a micro-language, thus being neither a prototypical dialect nor a prototypical language (Hentschel 2018: 43, 62).

Our interviews showed that there were differences between the families from cities/towns and rural families. People from urban environments (Gogolin, Klodnitz [now Kłodnica], Oberglogau [now Głogówek], Proskau [now Prószków], Oppeln [now Opole]) frequently mentioned that, before 1945, their families and surroundings spoke only German, and their family members did not come into contact with Polish or Silesian until after the war, although some respondents believed that their parents might have known Silesian. They were therefore monolingual. In contrast only a few inhabitants of rural areas reported that they were monolingual (for example Himmelwitz [now Jemielnica], Bierdzan [now Bierdzany], Josefsgrund [now Józefów], Norok [now Narok]). The rural population was mostly bilingual. They reported that before World War II, they spoke Silesian at home (Niesnaschin [now Nieznaszyn], Comprachtschütz [now Komprachcice], Mechnitz [now Mechnica], Groß Döbern [now Dobrzeń Wielki], Trawnig [now Trawniki], Straduna [now Stradunia], Friedersdorf [now Biedrzychowice]), while German was spoken in official domains. All the villages mentioned here, where our respondents come from, lie east of the line drawn by Wiesinger and showing the extent of the Polish language before World War II. The inhabitants of these villages, similar to our interviewees, were mostly bilingual, while the population west of the marked language border was mostly monolingual and spoke German dialects (Księżyk 2017: 24; Wiesinger 1983: 818). This is evidenced by the biography of one of our informants (XL_MÜN). By the age of six, that is until 1970, he lived in the village of Biedrzychowice where people spoke Silesian, although everybody knew German:

He knows this from the tales of his uncle, who lives in Berlin at present. This was the case both during the childhood of this informant and the pre-war times. This statement is confirmed by a local history researcher, Johannes Preisner, who quotes the census which shows that the majority of the rural population was bilingual at the beginning of the twentieth century: “In the census of December 1, 1910, there were 164 inhabited houses and one uninhabited building and a population of 1,233 persons in Friedersdorf. Of these 520 were male and 713 were female. […] Among the people in the census, 51 spoke only German, 307 only Polish and 875 spoke both German and Polish. 12 persons were of Slavic nationality, who came from Galicia and Russia” (Preisner 2009: 123). Interestingly, compared to 1905, the number of Polish-speaking monolingual persons dropped significantly, while the number of bilingual persons almost doubled (Preisner 2009: 124). In the following part of the interview, the informant XL_MÜN admits that it was different in the town of Głogówek, to which the informant moved when he had turned six. German was spoken there, though the indigenous people also understood Silesian. From the stories of his mother, who worked as a shop assistant for some time, he knows that German was often spoken in Głogówek even after 1945 (in the 1950s). This is also confirmed by an analysis of the comments made by the authorities in the 1950s, in which Głogówek often appears in connection with the use of the German language there and was even named ‘second Berlin’ (Dawid 2020: 368).

Repressions against speaking German, and the ban on teaching German in schools in the opolskie and katowickie regions (names of regions as in the 1950 administrative division) which was in force until 1989, thoroughly changed the linguistic situation in Upper Silesia. For fear of sanctions and discrimination, German was no longer used, and was replaced with Silesian or Polish. This is illustrated by the accounts of the interviewees who point out that in families with many children the language sometimes changed within a few years. Therefore, older children were still socialized in German, and their younger siblings were raised speaking Silesian or Polish. This is shown in several interviews:

The following fragment of the interview also shows the quick change from German to Polish or Silesian:

The breaking of the language continuum in families was a consequence of top-down language management. It should be firmly emphasized here once again that the break in the generational transmission of German was not a voluntary act rooted in one’s attitudes, but the outcome of a brutal anti-German policy enforced by the Polish state (Kamusella 2011: 773). This policy was highly effective, as the use of German was discouraged by the establishment of camps for the German-speaking population (Karch 2018: 259, 276–278; Madajczyk and Berlińska 2008: 273–309). One such camp operated in Gliwice from 1947 to 1949. People could find themselves in the camp for merely speaking German (Linek 2000: 363–367). Our interviewees can still recall their families suffering harsh penalties for speaking German:

The older generation, those born before 1945, possess more vivid, and frequently more painful memories.

German became a secret language used by the older generation to talk about topics not intended for children. This is evidenced by the statements:

Using German as a secret language was practiced in many families, including other regions in western Poland. Such a specialization of language function is a symptom of breaking the generational language continuum in families.

In some families, children were taught prayers in German, but in later years they no longer prayed in German:

In this context, the change of the language situation in Upper Silesia, also in the religious sphere should be mentioned. Church schematisma (directories) show that in the nineteenth century Polish was used in pastoral work in most Upper Silesian parishes, with the exception of a few districts such as Leobschütz [Głubczyce after 1945] and Grottkau [Grodków after 1945]. The second half of the nineteenth century saw the division into masses and services celebrated in the Polish or German language in many parishes (Kurpiers 2015: 73). This allowed the congregation to participate in services corresponding to their language competences and preferences. National languages at that time were used for praying and singing, because the masses were celebrated in Latin, which did not change until after the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. Especially after Hitler came to power in 1933, the use of German in the parochial ministry systematically increased, and in 1939 Polish was removed from the liturgy altogether (Hanich 2008: 52–53). Another radical unification of the language used in pastoral ministry took place in 1945, when the Polish state authorities ordered the Church to celebrate services exclusively in Polish. The ban on the use of German in the religious sphere was particularly strict in the villages and towns where the population spoke Silesian (Hanich 2008: 61–63). This caused extraordinary difficulties for both the population and priests attached to specific rites. This is illustrated by the following quote:

In Szymiszów, Strzelce Opolskie district, in May 1945, during the mass the priest announced in Polish which songs would be sung (three in Polish and two in Latin). Yet the young people sang two songs that were to be sung in Polish (Jesus, Jesus, come to me and Rejoice, Queen of Heaven) in German, probably not knowing the lyrics in Polish. […] After the end of 1945, the state authorities made efforts to remove Fr. Dean Leon Szal (another spelling of the name Schall). The priest’s problems began on November 11, when he translated the most important points of the pastoral letter to the faithful who did not understand Polish, and read the gospel to them in this [German – A.Z., F.K.] language. As he explained, the ban issued by the local authorities in Prudnik in early June applied only to songs and sermons in German. […] Finally, at the end of 1946, the authorities of the region decided to expel the priest to Germany (Linek 2000: 131).

Our interviewees also say that from 1945 to the 1989 breakthrough it was not possible to use German in the life of the Church. One of the informants admits that the priest preparing him for receiving the First Holy Communion was bilingual:

He categorically denies, however, that the priest would make use of it:

Gościęcin – a parish including Trawniki, the home village of the informant KI_WIM – was a German speech island before 1945. Most of its inhabitants were resettled to Germany after World War II and replaced by the displaced persons from the neighborhood of Lviv.

Another interviewee points out that also priests from Silesian families did not always meet the religious needs of native residents, and the Catholic Church was becoming a national institution:

Such attitudes were related to the fact that “the Polish state treated the Church as an object of national policy” (Linek 2000: 111).

Language macro-management exercised by the state through issuing a ban on the use of German in all spheres, translated into micro-management at the family level, also leading to the elimination of this language.

Admittedly, one of the founders of first German minority organizations in the Opolskie Region, Johann Kroll, claimed that “With Gomułka [Władysław Gomułka – the First Secretary of the Polish United Workers’ Party and the actual leader of the country in 1956–1970 – A.Z., F.K.] the polonization pressure eased, people could speak German among themselves, but children were not allowed to learn our language in schools” (Kroll and Kalicki 1991: 130), but it was more common for families to succumb to the pressure and not pass the language on to children (Ogiolda 2018: 19). This resulted in a generation gap when it came to knowing German. The opportunity for minority education did not appear until after the 1989 political breakthrough.

The interviews show that the German-speaking families began to use Silesian much more often than Polish. Speaking in Silesian, however, caused further problems. The main goal of the language policy in the whole of post-war Poland was to eradicate dialects. This was associated with political processes pursuing the cultural unification of all inhabitants of the country and ensuring the political, economic and cultural dominance of the ruling elite (Gajda 2001: 209), not only by removing non-Polish elements, but also by eliminating regional differentiation (Kneip 2000: 174). For this reason, the command of the standard Polish language was indispensable for social promotion. After World War II, for the first time in Polish history, a nationwide community was formed that included all classes and social strata, including peasants. A high position in the ethos of this community was attributed to literary language. In the 1940s–1970s, the number of users of this prestigious language variation increased. The massification of literary language in Poland led to internal qualitative changes and transformations in the system of language variations (Gajda 2001). Silesian was tolerated, but its low prestige was stressed at the same time. Speaking Silesian was persecuted in schools first and foremost, in line with the ideology of the linguistic unification of the country. One respondent remembers that students were pressured to refrain from speaking Silesian:

Failure to comply with language ideologies which privilege majority languages is usually the reason for the negative lived experience of language, associated with shame (Busch 2013: 18–19, Busch 2015). Shame arises when a speaker realizes that they have violated a linguistic or social norm by using a language considered socially unacceptable. Children were made to feel ashamed for speaking Silesian at school, which is evidenced by numerous statements about the language at school, e.g.,:

The same informant said that due to her being Silesian she was harassed in high school by other students and a Polish language teacher:

The above quotation shows that using Silesian was associated with having a German origin, which triggered insults referring to Nazism and war criminals.

Despite the state’s language policy aimed at eliminating Silesian, speakers from Upper Silesia are emotionally connected with it. Silesian is an indicator of Upper Silesian identity, as evidenced by fragments of interviews, such as:

Such a positive attitude stems from language meso-ideologies, which are contrary to the state macro-ideology in the Silesian community. Language macro-ideologies should be understood as a complex of beliefs, judgments, and concepts regarding or shaping the perception of languages and their users, which are shared in the area that transcends national, ethnic or linguistic borders. Internalized by persons from different social groups, language macro-ideologies directly or indirectly affect a large part of society. They change over time, but they are long-term structures overall. The macro-ideology in Poland says that people living in one country should have one common language and, vice versa, people who speak one language should have their own country. This is also known as the territorial principle. The territorial principle is an ideology that associates a particular language with a particular land, which produces subordination of other languages (Piller 2016, 35). Language meso-ideologies are spread across narrow social groups, in small areas (Turner 2012). The meso-ideology in Upper Silesia says that Silesians should speak Silesian, and thus there is tension between the top-down language management organized by state and that organized by local, bottom-up management.

5 Language change after migration to Germany

While the autobiographical interviews of the people born before 1945 show that their socialization before the end of World War II was either monolingual in German or bilingual – in German and Silesian, the representatives of the generation born after 1945 often did not know German before leaving for Germany. The transmission of German in their families was interrupted to the extent that the people who went to Germany as adults learned German from scratch in language courses, and sometimes they never developed good language skills. This is especially true for people who did not pursue any education in Germany, apart from language courses, as well as for those who live in Silesian endogamous marriages, who usually speak Polish or Silesian at home, and have little contact with German due to their occupation. Several examples of how these speakers assess their language competence follow:

A lack of knowledge of German generated a lot of frustration and problems at the beginning of the interviewees’ stay in Germany, e.g.,:

Polish was used in private, and German in external contacts:

In the following fragment of the interview, the informant talking about the use of language in his mother’s family home in Upper Silesia draws an analogy to the language practices used in his family in Germany:

In endogamous marriages, where both spouses come from Poland, Silesian dominates in their communication, although they also speak Polish and German, in various configurations. Several examples follow.

The informant in the last quotation is trying to illustrate how she and her husband talk using the example of the verb wylyszować – ‘to delete’. She is integrating the German verb löschen – ‘to delete, erase’ into the Polish language, attaching the Polish infinitive ending and a prefix wy-. Thereby a hybrid wylyszować emerges, which the speaker classifies as part of neither the Polish nor German language systems. In the opinion of the speaker, by mixing the two codes the spouses are simplifying their communication.

Multilingualism and language mixing were practiced in everyday life:

In the last sentence, the verb lyszować ‘to delete, erase’ refers to the speaker’s mixing languages when communicating with her husband. She gives this word as an example of mixing languages.

6 Language practices pertaining to the next generation born in Germany

While communication between spouses is spontaneous, German is consciously chosen for conversations with children. The same applies also to the children of close relatives, or the entire generation that was born in Germany. Only in isolated cases did one or both parents use Polish or Silesian in conversations with their children, either due to their insufficient competence in German

The biographical interviews collected show that, in some cases, the spouses’ speaking Silesian and Polish turned out to be sufficient for their children to acquire the ability to communicate in these languages. As a result, they can speak Polish or Silesian when visiting Poland, e.g.,:

We know from interviews that some of the adult children of our informants have decided to learn or improve their Polish as part of study exchanges at universities in Poland, others on language courses, for instance, the daughter of one of the interviewees:

The change of language in many families also pertained to the sphere of religion. Some immigrants have an opportunity to participate in masses in Polish, but they do not take advantage of it. Usually, the decision is made for practical reasons, one being the distance from the church and the other – the conviction that they can pray in German, so they are not interested in the mass in Polish. This is illustrated by one of the respondents from Lambrecht:

The above quote features another important topic of children’s participation in religious life. It is because of the children, first and foremost, that the respondent participates in masses in German. This is in line with the already mentioned policy of raising children in the majority language.

7 The conceptualization of multilingualism

The interviewees conceptualize their multilingualism as part of socially and politically grounded language ideologies. There are two main language ideologies in Europe that have been historically significant for the process of modernization and formation of nation-states in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. One is the belief in language standardization, and the other is monolingualism (Farr and Song 2011). According to these ideologies, which are mutually related and complement each other, an ideal person speaks one standardized language. The conviction about the value of monolingualism, and the resulting belief that multilingualism is harmful in education, is the reason for choosing the language of the state, the majority and socially dominant language, to communicate with children. That is why the immigrants from Silesia have spoken German with their children despite their poor language skills. The following illustrates the power of the ideology of monolingualism:

The ideology of multilingualism was associated with the strong conviction about the need for assimilation:

The interviewees express fears that they may be harassed because of speaking Polish:

The interviewees have observed that the attitude towards bilingualism has changed recently. The following comments refer to changes in language ideologies and the formation of a positive image of bilingualism in Germany:

As a consequence, some interviewees consider their decision to speak with their children only in German to be a mistake in retrospect:

8 Conclusion

The article presents the impact of language ideologies and language policies on the change of the language of immigrants from Silesia living in Germany. Language ideologies are systems of beliefs about language widely acknowledged in a given society, and the most widespread of which are unquestioned (Chromik 2014: 69; Wolfram 1998: 109). Ideologies operate as a doxa – the convictions and truths, or conventional opinions, about what the social order should be, that are believed to be natural and binding, therefore they are neither discussed nor examined, they are taken for granted. Language ideologies have causative power; they can determine whether a language will be preserved or lost and even affect its structures (Chromik 2014: 68; Jaffe 1999). In this way, language ideologies are a bond between social structures and language. They influence the formation of the social standard of linguistic behavior in multilingual communities. They determine the value of languages and classify them as correct or incorrect. Moreover, whether or not a person speaks correctly determines how they feel. Brigitta Busch has introduced the term Spracherleben, ‘lived experience of language,’ to linguistics (2013: 18–20). Lived experience of language is related to the emotions felt when communicating in a language: does a person feel fully themselves then, or do they have the impression that they are an actor on stage, or another person? Do they feel accepted or, the other way round, they feel ashamed and fear rejection? Do they feel strong and efficient, or rather weak and ineffective? Busch points out that the emotional experience of language use has been a neglected aspect of studies on multilingualism, as researchers have rather focused their attention on language competence and other measurable parameters. Each lived experience of language is individual and arises in a particular situation.

In this paper the material collected makes it possible to distinguish the main themes and topics that recur in many autobiographical narratives, including those of lived experience of language. The interviews with immigrants from Upper Silesia share several narrative themes which are important to the interviewees because they are always related to their personal encounters, experiences and feelings. That is why the stories about language experiences are turning points in language biographies.

The first topic recurring in the interviews concerns the language change that occurred in the generation of their grandparents and parents after 1945. This change was an outcome of historical and social circumstances in which the territory where they lived had been transferred from one state to another, at the same time their language change occurred in traumatic post-war conditions of coercion and terror. Language policy is a system of laws and rules implementing language ideologies that are desirable from the point of view of the authorities, and the goal of state language policy at that time was to eliminate German quickly and completely. Therefore top-down language management was performed through intimidation, punishment, and discrimination against German speakers. As a result German-speaking inhabitants of Silesia decided to rapidly change the language spoken in their families. This resulted in intergenerational language transmission being interrupted.

The second topic concerns the lack of knowledge of German. The immigrants leaving for Germany did not know the language of their ancestors and learning German at language courses did not ensure full and satisfactory command of the language. For this reason, in the first phase of their stay in Germany, the dominant feeling associated with language was shame. The immigrants sought full assimilation with German society, and their lack of perfect command of German was a serious obstacle in these endeavors. Thus, the ideology of monolingualism was in line with the ideology of assimilation. The third topic is language planning focusing on children. Teaching children German was the goal of language management in families. That is why the immigrants, although they had not mastered the language themselves, spoke German to their children. Paradoxically, they passed on a language they had only recently learned while not seeking to pass on Polish or Silesian, in which they were raised themselves, to the younger generation.

The collected biographical interviews show that language change is associated with the change of state and of the state language, and results from the hegemony of language ideologies which combine nationality and loyalty to the state with the use of one majority language. There is a significant difference between the change of the language from German to Silesian or Polish in the Silesian community in Poland after 1945, and the change of the language from Silesian and Polish to German after emigration to Germany. The former was a top-down change, initiated and organized by state authorities using brutal methods. The participants were forced to change their language. On the other hand, the change of language in Germany was a bottom-up change initiated by the bilingual speakers themselves with state support. The dramatic history of the families surveyed has come full circle because they have returned to communicating in German.

List of informants quoted

LX_GEM

male living in Gemmingen, born in Koźle in 1960, he left in 1988

XL_MÜN

male living in München, born in Prudnik in 1964, he left in 1987

KI_WIM

male living in Wimbuch, born in Koźle in 1968, he left in 1991

SO_LAM

male living in Lambrecht, born in Polska Cerekiew in 1964, he left in 1991

LO_LAM

female living in Lambrecht, born in Koźle in 1970, she left in 1990

BN_WUP

male living in Wuppertal, born in Biedrzychowice in 1964, he left in 1990

KL_BIE

male living in Bielefeld, born in Głogówek in 1962, he left in 1988

NF_PAD

female living in Paderborn, born in Krapkowice in 1968, she left in 1990

NT_LÜB

male living in Lübeck, born in Koźle in 1961, he left in 1981

CL_BIE

female living in Bielefeld, born in Głogówek in 1965, she left in 1979

KN_HAT

female living in Hattingen, born in Głogówek in 1965, she left in 1989

HM_STE

male living in Steinen, born in Głogówek in 1965, he left in 1988

LU_KOŹ

male living in Kędzierzyn-Koźle, born in Cosel in 1940

SL_OPO

female living in Opole, born in Oppeln in 1939